Jade Regent – Forest of Spirits, Session 6

Sixth Session (7 page pdf) – At the heart of the House of the Withered Blossoms, we find the oni Munascuru, and fight her and her children for the kami and for glory!

The first fight took a long time – I arrowed the hell out of the oni and Bjorn dropped her, but the chain devils up near the ceiling were like AC 31 or something once the cover’s figured in, and they have DR. Took Gobo putting an align weapon on my bow to finally dispense with it. Everyone else was occupied trying to kill a mostly dead but regenerating oni the whole time – by the rules it’s remarkably hard to finish them off while you’re still in combat.

My favorite part of that fight was us trying to cover up for the fact that we have an invisible rogue around.

V’lk casts greater invisibility and runs over to help Bjorn with the archers. Bjorn lands a flurry of blows on an archer, wounding him, and suddenly a bunch more wounds appear, spraying blood, and the archer falls. “Sword of the North Star style!” Bjorn yells and runs after another archer. This one obtains an array of wounds from the invisible V’lk before Bjorn even gets there. “Precognitive Sword Strike!” he yells as he hacks away at him.

As most final boss fights are, the fight with Munascuru was short but brutal. We almost misjudged badly, we buffed up and busted into her lair based on intel from the prisoners – to find out her lair is a whole sub-dungeon, we ran to and fro trying to find her before our 1/round buffs expired!

Once we busted in on her it was a true team effort. I charge her and smite her badly, Jacob flies up and breathes a line of fire on her, Bjorn comes in with a full attack routine, and V’lk stab-murders her invisibly from behind. She got in one shot – a crit with a naginata which probably would have killed me outright. However, one of my newest samurai tricks is to throw off a critical hit using my resolve!

The rest is all wrapup. The spirit possessing V’lk leaves and gives him a free weapon proficiency. He takes wakizashi as it fits his two-weapon fighting style so I gave him my magical one, Whispering Shrike, to commemorate the occasion (he got the kill shot in on Munascuru). Hiro is moving from his “glory for me!” origins into a “all for one, one for all” guy along the lines of what the Order of the Dragon dictates.

Now, it’s on to the penultimate chapter, Tide of Honor, where we recruit help to take back Minkai!